As the city of Memphis prepares to mark its 200th anniversary, the Chickasaw Nation is finding the story of its origins in a part of the city Native Americans left 500 years ago.

“The Chickasaw were the people who controlled the Memphis area and West Tennessee and North Mississippi from the 1600s through the 1700s and into the early 1800s,” said Chickasaw Nation archaeologist Brad Lieb. “Memphis is really the biggest city in the Chickasaw homeland.”

For the last four years, the nation, based in Ada, Oklahoma, since the 1830s Trail of Tears forced relocation of Chickasaws and other Native American tribes, has put a renewed emphasis on its origins.

Chickasaw governor Bill Anoatubby founded the Chickasaw Inkana Foundation in 2014 with plans to build a heritage center in Tupelo, Mississippi, where the foundation already has its offices. And there are longer-term general plans for a district office in Memphis.

Inkana is the Chickasaw word for friend.

“He is dedicated to reconnecting Chickasaw people with their homeland’s heritage,” Lieb said of Anoatubby. “He wants Chickasaws to be proud of their heritage and he wants them to know their heritage. Coming here and reconnecting with some of these ancestral places is important.”

Anoatubby, who has been governor of the nation since 1987 and was lieutenant governor from 1979 to 1987, has been to Memphis several times over the years, including a 1990s visit to commemorate the Chickasaws who crossed the Mississippi River at Memphis in the 1830s to move west on the Trail of Tears.

It included a ceremony atop one of the mounds in Chickasaw Heritage Park and a boat ride across the Mississippi River in the rain, as well as the dedication of a historical marker on the riverfront about the relocation.

Anoatubby was also in the city for the 1985 dedication of a Roy Tamboli life-sized bronze sculpture of Chickasaw leader Piomingo that is part of the First Tennessee Heritage Collection.

Lieb and other archaeologists and historians continue to explore the origins of the Chickasaws.

Chucalissa’s place in history

The result for Memphis is an evolving view of Chucalissa, the mound complex in southwest Memphis abandoned by native Americans sometime in the 1500s after centuries of habitation.

Chucalissa was the name given to the site when it was found anew in the 1930s as T. O. Fuller State Park was being developed. Today, the C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa is part of the University of Memphis.

Richard Green, a former historian to the Chickasaw nation, believes the origins of the Chickasaws began at Chucalissa, among other places in the larger region.

“The interest the Chickasaws have is where did these people go when they abandoned the mounds,” Green said. “Nobody has a really good handle on that. There are some tribes including the Chickasaws who feel some of those people probably wound up as Chickasaws, pairing up with others to become ancestral Chickasaws.”

Lieb says links between Chucalissa and the mounds in Chickasaw Heritage Park are an open question. The past, without applying modern archaeological methods to the mounds, is “murky.”

“I don’t think they were occupied at the same time because they are not far enough apart. There was probably a sequence where one was abandoned and the other sprang up,” Lieb said. “And that’s the way we are beginning to understand chiefly leadership in this Mississippian period was very volatile. You had this growing number of people claiming close kinship. Rank and status in these communities was calculated by genealogical distance to the ruling chief.”

The more people claiming that status, the more conflict there was.

“You had some of that conflict being resolved by budding off or outmigration, immigration,” he said. “A leader would take his followers and move some distance and start a new town. And that would of course weaken the town that they left from. There’s just a proliferation of these mound sites in the Desoto, Tunica, Coahoma counties area along the Mississippi River and on the Arkansas side as well.”

Lieb believes Chucalissa’s site had symbolic importance in its time.

“That was a very intentional location to point up the significance of the local leaders there and we see that all along the Mississippi Valley bluff edge,” he said.

At the time the Mississippi River ran by the bottom of the bluff that Chucalissa’s bluff and its mounds sit atop. The bottom of the bluff is now land that includes a railroad line.

“I’ve always felt like that’s lost on the current Chucalissa,” Lieb said. “You think this is just a clearing in the woods.”

Parts of the Chickasaw account of that history, including the treaties and agreements with the U.S. government that set the stage for the city’s founding in May 1819, are found in oral histories and traditions as well as accounts from European explorers.

There are also interviews transcribed from U.S. officials seeking to determine Native-American ownership of land and tribal boundaries from around the time Memphis was founded.

“The U.S. was trying to figure out tribal boundaries in the early 1800s because they were trying to buy the land and get the land from the right tribe,” Lieb said. “These proceedings have never been transcribed en toto. You can read the longhand from the War Department. You have these depositions or a recounting of tribal traditions from 1816 when they were very fresh in everyone’s mind.”

And there are records of the Chickasaw landowners and their holdings 20 years after the city’s founding.

As the U.S. government moved toward forced removal on the Trail of Tears, the Chickasaw homeland, including Memphis, was divided into 36 townships by surveyors. The agreement the Chickasaw negotiated with the U.S. government required that those sections be deeded to the Chickasaws living there “for personal private sale at removal so they would have cash for removal to Indian territory in Oklahoma.”

“Chickasaw families still have a lot of these surnames. And they can actually take them to where their ancestors left from,” Lieb said. “It’s a very important experience as you can imagine for Chickasaw. The tours often go through Memphis. They go see Chucalissa and Chickasaw Heritage Park.”

The park includes two surviving mounds from a complex of mounds in the French Fort area by the Harahan Bridge crossing the Mississippi River at Memphis. There is also a 2012 statue of a Native American woman wrapped in a cloak that includes scenes from the area’s history and the names of Chickasaw towns.

Preliminary attempts to study or excavate those mounds in the late 1980s drew protests from Native Americans who held vigils on the mounds. Plans were then quickly called off.

Lieb said archaeology has evolved over that time to include ending the exhibition of skeletal remains excavated at Chucalissa.

“There has been an imbalance in displaying Native American remains in museums and treating them like they are some kind of extinct species like wooly mammoths or saber-tooth tigers when there are still living people,” he said. “There are living descendants and they still exist. They are just removed because the empowered did that to them, too. A lot of that is being brought toward a balance.”

The balance is a move away from a search for graves and art in those graves. And Lieb says it could include a move toward the areas in the vicinity of Chucalissa that includes a better idea about the size of the community.

“There must have been outlying sites around Chucalissa where the farmers that supplied the community lived, and really where the majority of the population lived,” he said. “It probably came to the point where they only gathered at that site. They didn’t actually all live right around the plaza anymore. … That research that may have been neglected in the past is now the current thing.”

Control of the Memphis Bluffs

The Chickasaw didn’t live in what became the original Memphis until the years just before the city’s founding although they were a constant presence on so-called Chickasaw Bluffs for centuries.

By 1682 when French explorer Robert LaSalle was journeying down the Mississippi River and stopped at what is present-day Memphis, he and his company encountered wary Chickasaws based on their 1541 battle with Hernando de Soto’s conquistadors – a battle the Chickasaws won.

Wendy St. Jean, assistant professor of history at Purdue University Northwest, who has researched Southeastern Indians in the 18th and 19th centuries, said the Chickasaw “did not derive their power from their numbers.”

“They were always less numerous than the neighboring Choctaws, Cherokees and Creeks,” she said by email. “Their power – their ability to harass the French and keep a significant English threat in the region – was their control over the Memphis bluffs, from which they raided hostile Indian boats and French ships.”

The Memphis office of the Army Corps of Engineers has maps that mark changes in the river dating back to the 1700s.

“It is an overlay of every time there was a relatively major change in the river going back to the 18th century when the first real surveys were made,” said Jim Pogue, public information officer for the Corps’ Memphis office.

Along with the changes, the maps show what the Chickasaw, the colonial powers and the founders of Memphis all came to realize over several centuries the advantages of high ground the bluffs provided.

“It didn’t flood easily being on the bluffs, which was a really big thing,” Pogue said. “Everything north of Memphis is not on that higher ground … This has been a settlement area for imperial powers for a long time. … Any spot that didn’t flood on a regular basis was a plus.”

Lieb says accounts from French exploration parties describe Chickasaw wearing the hides of buffalo and bear along the river and then ambushing hunting parties that came ashore.

After the raids the Chickasaw didn’t linger on the bluffs but instead took the military supplies, slaves and food and “usually made away with it all before their enemies could track them down,” St. Jean said. “Where other warriors might make a feast of captured liquor and other goods, the Chickasaws rarely celebrated a successful raid until they were back safe in their villages.”

Green said the Chickasaw had encampments in what is now Memphis but they functioned more as sentries and gatekeepers.

And that is what La Salle encountered in 1682 on his mission to find the mouth of the river.

“He and his soldiers stopped here and encountered a scouting and hunting party of five Chickasaws,” Green wrote in a 2008 essay published in the Chickasaw Times newspaper.

“He wanted to be taken to their villages, but they sensed his evil intent and led him in circles.”

By then, Chucalissa had been abandoned for more than a century by Native Americans and Chickasaws were based in the Tupelo, Mississippi, area.

There were powerful leaders within the nation who were on different sides as Spain and France and England attempted to colonize different parts of the area.

James Colbert, who was white and had several Chickasaw wives, led a pro-British faction of Chickasaws who harassed Spanish and American shipping from the bluffs, Green said.

Payamahata was leader of the pro-Spain faction as a war chief and diplomat.

Meanwhile, another war chief, Mingo Ouma, was pro-American and by 1793 Americans delivered arms at the bluffs to Piomingo, the new chief of the pro-American faction of the Chickasaw.

Two years later, Ugulaycabe, leader of the pro-Spain faction, granted Spain the right to build a fort and trading post, even receiving gifts from the Spanish along with King Chimubbbee of the Chickasaw. Soon after Spain settled with the United States and as a result Spain gave up its claim to the lower Mississippi valley, including what would become Memphis in less than 25 years.

Colbert’s four sons assumed political leadership of the Chickasaw at the end of the 18th century and it was one of those sons, William Colbert, who as Chickasaw chief in July 1797, gave the U.S. permission to build Fort Pike on the bluffs. Ugulaycabe came to the bluffs four months later and ordered the Americans to leave. He was rebuked by Colbert and Piomingo whose position carried the day at the council on the bluffs.

“This council at the bluffs marked the passing of one age and the beginning of another,” Green wrote in his essay.

Establishing the City of Memphis

The right to build a U.S. road through Chickasaw land to the bluff followed in 1801 in exchange for about $700 in goods. The goods were to be bought at a trading post run by the government, known as a “factory,” that sold goods on credit with the premise that eventually the Chickasaw would have to repay their debt with their land.

The Chickasaw ceded the land that included the Chickasaw Bluffs to the U.S. in 1818, setting the stage for the rise of Memphis and its founding the next year.

By then the future ownership of what became Memphis by a Nashville-based group was already locked up.

The original Memphis was part of 5,000 acres of land known as the Rice grant bought by John Rice from the state of North Carolina in 1783, 13 years before the state of Tennessee was established.

“The fact that it belonged to the Chickasaw Nation by solemn treaty disturbed neither party in the transaction,” James Roper wrote in “The Founding of Memphis,” a book published in 1969 for the city’s sesquicentennial observances. “Rice was taking part in a huge land grab engineered by his group of land jobbers.”

North Carolina was holding what would become Tennessee in trust until there was a settlement with Native Americans including the Chickasaw, west of the Tennessee River to the Mississippi River.

Rice paid $2,500 and filed his claim at a land office near Durham, North Carolina, contingent on a survey to be completed a year later but not effective until it could be filed with the register of the county where the land was – once the county was established.

Rice was killed in a battle with Indians in 1791 near Clarksville five years before the state of Tennessee was founded. His brother sold Rice’s claim three years later to John Overton for $500.

“Since (future President) Andrew Jackson and Overton had a standing agreement about land purchases, Jackson became half-owner of the tract for a consideration listed on the books at $100,” Roper wrote. Shortly thereafter, Jackson sold half of his half to Stephen and Richard Winchester for $625, according to Roper.

“These brothers, with a symmetry and neatness worthy of a family vaudeville act, promptly turned their purchase over to two other brothers of theirs, William and James, for a quick familial profit at $1,000,” Roper wrote.

Historian John M. Keating, in his 1888 “History of the City of Memphis,” put the term purchase in quotation marks as he described the meeting 70 years earlier between the Chickasaw leaders and Jackson and Tennessee Gov. Isaac Shelby. They were commissioned by President James Monroe to negotiate for Chickasaw land in West Tennessee including what became Memphis.

The deal depended on a series of annual payments of approximately $20,000 and how many payments there would be.

The bargaining reached 14 annual payments when Levi Colbert, then the chief of the Chickasaw who was also known as Itawamba, asked for “one cent” more. Jackson agreed only to find out later that Colbert didn’t mean a penny. He meant another year on the annuity making a total of 15 annual payments.

Shelby wouldn’t give, according to Keating’s account. “The general inquired of him, in the presence of the whole company, if they had not, between themselves agreed to go as high as $500,000 for the desired territory,” Keating wrote.

Shelby held firm and Jackson vowed to take the agreement to Washington for ratification without his signature. Jackson also put up $20,000 of his own money to pay the final year of the annuity if Congress didn’t ratify it. Shelby accepted but, according to Keating, “rode away with General Jackson from the treaty ground, in good humor, their friendship unimpaired, and before he had gone far he tore up the bond.”

All involved signed the agreement in October of 1818. Four months later, Jackson, John Overton and James Winchester, according to documents filed later, formally agreed to lay out a town on the Rice grant land.

Jackson then sold his remaining interest in the future city of Memphis to James Winchester for $5,000.

“The acre that had cost Overton 10 cents was now worth $8, even to a business associate,” Roper concluded.